The mobile communication is currently witnessing the fusion of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones into smart phones with increasing diversity in their capabilities. With hardware becoming increasingly cheaper, handheld devices for computing and communication will become faster, smaller, more accessible, more affordable, and easier to use. In addition, new short-range radio communication standards such as ZigBee, WiMedia Ultra Wide Band (UWB) and WiFi-Direct are emerging while promising hundreds of megabits per second data rate with low power consumption—hence are more suitable for mobile handsets. This leads to a widespread availability of mobile handheld devices that are equipped with one or plurality of such short-range radio standards as WiFi (IEEE 802.11 and its variants), Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1), ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4), Infrared, WiMedia UWB and the like. Hence, a smart computing and communication space filled with multitude of heterogeneous handheld devices in the move together with fixed powerful devices allowing cyber-foraging should be the direct outcome of these technological advancements, and where heterogeneous devices are able to get together and form a network spontaneously on demand as long as they are within each other's radio range. This rapid proliferation can stimulate a general trend towards extending Peer-to-Peer (P2P) characteristics to wireless environments. With this, dynamic composition of network is possible on-the-fly and this will improve human interactions and collaborations.
This dynamic network formation that encompasses heterogeneous devices greatly benefits from the ability to rapidly create, deploy and manage services, applications and protocols in response to user demands. In such environments, the execution of a complex task does not necessarily make use of preconfigured devices or networks, but requires instead the selection of suitable computing elements on-the-fly, based on the task requirements and device characteristics (i.e., networking-on-demand or task/user-centric networking). This is the “anyone, anywhere, anytime” paradigm of intelligent overlay community establishment that uses mobile ad hoc networking (MANET) as the basic underlying technology. In this new communication paradigm applications and the services are not ported onto a pre-existing network, but where the network itself grows out of the applications and the services which end users want. This approach enables users to view the network in the manner most appropriate to them and their requirements. This can push the boundaries of today's handheld devise users in terms of their ability to form different networks on demand using short-range communication capabilities in an ad hoc way while being attached to the original conventional mobile/wireless systems namely 3G+, 4G, WiMAX, and WiFi. However, this potential has not been realized yet technically and commercially due to the following four fundamental reasons:                i) the first important problem is associated with the security as this type of spontaneous collaboration often inevitably demands communicating with total strangers, and this discourages or prevents users of devices being equipped with one or more short-range radio communication technologies from being connected to each other without using any pre-existing infra-structure in an ad hoc way (e.g., threat of Bluejacking in the case of Bluetooth),        ii) the second reason attributes to the unavailability of a unified framework allowing interaction among devices being equipped with different short-range radio technologies in a cohesive and collective way by making them understand each other,        iii) the third reason is the unavailability of killer applications, and        iv) the fourth reason attributes to the unavailability of a mechanism that can bridge a gap between a pure ad-hoc network mainly employing short-range radio standards and any fixed network.        
The present invention seeks to overcome the above drawbacks, and particularly seeks to provide a unified solution for easy and economical spontaneous user collaborative experiences.
To aid further understanding of the present invention, a brief disclosure of various types of heterogeneous handheld devices and on-demand networking principles are now provided. Each handheld device is expected by the present invention to have communication and computing capabilities, and hence sometimes referred to as a handheld mobile communication and computing device or heterogeneous device by the present invention. However, in terms of processing and communication capabilities and the internal memory footprint being possessed, any heterogeneous device can be classified as either a “thick” or a “thin” device. As the names imply, a “thick” device possesses huge processing power while enjoying amble internal memory, whereas a “thin” device is characterised by having very low processing power and very limited internal memory footprint. In addition, there exists two main categories of networks depending on how such networks are formed;                i) Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET): networks being able to operate in standalone fashion without necessitating any reliance on any fixed infrastructure.        ii) Infra-Structure-based Network: if the formed network heavily requisites any type of dependence on any pre-existing infra-structure.        
By the term ad-hoc network, the patent means the formation of a network on-the-fly without relying upon any infra-structure-based network, i.e., using any fixed databases or centralised server functionalities. Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are the typical example of this category. On the other hand, there is a different on-demand network formation that makes use of ad hoc networking principles while using any fixed infra-structure. Hence, it is possible that devices forming such networks on demand may belong to different physical networks at the same time, for e.g., computers belonging to Ethernet or WLAN, or mobile nodes belonging to GSM, 2.5G, 3G, and 4G cellular networks and relies on some centralised resources. In this respect it needs to be explained at this juncture that the networks thus formed on demand may consist of fixed and mobile devices. Such networks are normally referred to as hybrid networks. However, in this document, the term hybrid network means the type of network consisting of any mobile and/or fixed devices that uses predominantly the short-range radio technologies for communicating with each other (i.e., for user traffic) and thus is standalone from this perspectives although it sporadically interacts with the centralised server and the associated databases in order to achieve various optional management and control functionalities (for instance enabling mutual authentication and non-repudiation—a necessary feature to ensure secure spontaneous interactions among total strangers, resolving duplicate address detection, performing availability predictions and ensuring session continuity when handing over from a hybrid/ad-hoc network to a conventional infra-structure-based network (e.g., cellular or Internet) and vice-versa).
There exists a multitude of prior works (e.g., patents namely WO 2007/084807 A1, WO 2007/040864 A3, WO 2005/083956 A1, US 2008/0108437 A1, US 2007/0197160 A1 and US 2004/0087274 A1) proposing various solutions to the same research problem of enabling ad hoc network collaborations this patent tries to address. However, in general, other solutions appearing in the literature have various short-comings and deficiencies such as security threats, needing special hardwired solutions, privacy, scalability, and interoperability issues and more importantly the new user experience that is possible with an introduction of novel application and services suit as proposed in this patent.
For instance, patent WO 2007/084807 A1 envisages the formation of a medical ad hoc network where each peer device is hardwired and includes a special hardware called Body-Coupled Communication (BCC) interface for the purpose of authenticating a user. According to that piece of work, joining an existing network requires the user to touches the new device and any device belonging to the established network; in contrary, our proposed framework does not require any such behaviour by any user. Further, patent WO 2007/084807 A1 does not propose any special auto-configuration method; instead, it uses Bluetooth-based connection establishment and mutual authentication which requires manual intervention at least in the first instance. This further precludes any interaction among total strangers without requiring a face-to-face meeting. Further this ad hoc networking is made possible only among purpose built special devices whereas according to the proposed solutions of our patent the intention is to make such spontaneous collaboration possible among any generic handheld devices as long as they have any short-range wireless transceiver and a mechanism to connect to the centralized server intermittently either before or during the spontaneous collaborations.
Patent WO 2007/040864 A3 envisages an ad hoc network where there exists a clear distinction of devices in terms of the functionalities expected from each of them and accordingly there exists one master device (i.e., a controller) and a plurality of slave devices. With appropriate assignment of priorities, the master device controls the membership of slaves as a way to conserve battery energy of devices. In contrary, the proposed solution of our patent is a complete framework and does not work on the master-slave paradigm.
Patent WO 2005/083956 A1 proposes client-server based ad hoc collaborations where the service discovery is reactive as opposed to being proactive as proposed in our patent and the discovering client needs to forward the found information to the central server for it to keep all the client information and the topological map in a client database. The server is mandatory and also controls the discovery schedule detailing which client should do next. There are instances when primary clients can discover others but incapable of being discovered. A similar solution is presented in US 2004-0087274 A1. On the other hand, in our proposed framework, the centralized server optionally exists—but its existence allows namely mutual authentication, session continuity, user availability predictions and duplicate address resolution in addition to bringing other benefits. However, our proposed methodologies, and system framework still allows fully distributed operation (it is called semi-distributed) if all the handheld devices have up-to-date information in their local database possibly by getting the local database synchronized with the centralized one prior to the spontaneous collaboration.
Patent US 2008/0108437 A1 proposes a method to facilitate multi-user gaming via an ad hoc network. This is not scalable as this scheme envisages the exchange of the description of the plurality of games among the participating players. On the other hand, our proposed framework uses special IDs such as Service IDs and Game IDs and this helps the service discovery protocol to find the right players quickly, and in order to make sure that different users use the same ID for a given game, it needs to be registered first in the centralized server by the game introducer.
Patent US 2007/0197160 A1 presents a low cost apparatus and method to broadcast music in an ad hoc network. It hence requires special hardware for this purpose, and has one application in mind On the other hand, our methodologies and the system framework enable any handheld device users/owners to interact in multiple ways using a variety of applications—and some of them are novel. Our proposal ensures mutual authentication and non-repudiation, and hence allows any user to interact with any stranger as long as the proposed system framework and methodologies confirms the authenticity of users.
In essence, the framework enabling secure spontaneous interaction proposed in our patent has unique features that make the inventions easily standout from the prior art because of the way the proposal tries to bridge a gab between MANETS and any fixed infra-structure (i.e., centralised server and associated database) and such features are made possible with sporadic interaction with the centralised server/databases.
It should also be noted here that while there exists various solutions to the problem of ad hoc network interaction, there has been no proper attempt to apply it to the same research problem in order to enable secure auto-configuration and subsequent secure ad hoc collaboration among total strangers being possible through a novel application suite along with an ability to maintain session continuity when users move a part substantially that they go out-of-range of each other in the manner proposed here. In addition to being a scalable and very pragmatic commercial solution because of the way the ad hoc network makes use of fixed centralised server and the associated database to assure total strangers to interact with each other with no fear, it brings in additional benefits such as being applicable to any application and services (i.e., not tied to a particular application), assuring security among sporadic strangers without requiring them to have any interaction prior to any ad hoc collaboration, being applicable at a global level without requiring any special hardware or hardwired mechanism, assuring session continuity, ensuring user privacies and many as slightly discussed previously.